PC Magazine Editors' Choice winner StoreSense, an online shopping merchant application, morphed into eBay ProStores (www.prostores.com) when the online auction powerhouse acquired Kurant in January 2005. ProStores 6.0 is a complete solution for merchants who need more flexibility than eBay Stores provides. It offers automated step-by-step store creation for beginners and more advanced design tools for the experienced.

Four subscription levels, from $6.95 monthly for a very basic ten-product site to a whopping $249.95 per month for enterprise-level service (with special attention to inventory and marketing/sales), offer a range of capabilities. It's a terrific blend of merchant muscle, conceived and executed exceptionally well.

We reviewed ProStores Business, for which the base cost is $29.95 per month and an addition 0.5-percent fee taken on successful transactions. (Current eBay Store sellers receive a 30-percent discount). This level is quite adequate for eBay sellers and other small companies. It includes a personalized domain, 5GB of storage space, up to 50GB per month for data transfer, up to 50 unique mailboxes, great documentation, and 24/7 tech support.

Your product catalog can contain an unlimited number of items, which can be listed and cross-sold on eBay. Shipping integration with the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post is built in, as is the ability to print packing labels.

Getting up and running is easy whether you're starting from scratch or integrating an existing Web site. You'll find 180 wizard-driven templates and you can select from numerous preferences, such as whether to use ProStores or your own Web site as a home page. You can customize these and other pages, selecting layouts, fonts, colors, and payment options, and adding text, images, products, and services.

Merchants who want to do more personalized tweaking can use the Design Studio, which lets you add and alter templates and link to outside sites using HTML and ProStores' own tools. A clear, intuitive interface and online reference guide ease your journey through the creation process. You can make your storefront dazzle by using third-party tools such as Dreamweaver, Flash, and MP3s.

The Store Administration page is an all-encompassing dashboard. It uses a dynamic outline tree to store preferences for billing options, sales-tax computation, accounting synchronization with QuickBooks, and the like. It also lists product details, including promotional information and manufacturers' data. Other content includes customer lists, orders, and customizable reports.

The ProStores home page provides interactive links to quick statistics, order and customer data, product information, and more. The service also helps with your marketing efforts, facilitating e-mail campaigns and submitting your content to leading shopping search engines every day.

You can process payments through a special merchant account called PayPal Website Payments Pro. Fees are competitive with other merchant accounts, and the service accepts several types of paymentscredit cards, bank transfers, electronic checks, debit cards, and PayPal balance paymentsthrough one centralized provider. Setup and gateway fees are $20 per month and 2.2 to 2.9 percent of sales (depending on monthly volume) plus 30 cents per transaction.

As part of this substantial upgrade, ProStores offers customers new features. For example, they can now add items to their carts without going to the carts and place an order without opening an account, and the shopping-cart page has a shipping calculator.

Merchants now have access to inventory management in all tiers and can get more help optimizing their sites so search engines will pick them up. The service can also automatically generate thumbnails from images of any size.

This merchant-maker combines the best of both worlds: the undisputed power of eBay with a unique storefront builder and manager. You can get more for your buck than with eBay Stores, while separating yourself from the increasingly deafening noise of eBay. ProStores 6.0 stands with the best of the storefront creation applications.

Kathy Yakal has been annoying computer magazine editors since 1983, when she got her first technology writing job because she tagged along with her ex-husband on a job interview. She started freelancing and specializing in...

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